With One Week Until Election Day, One Factor Trumps All

President Donald Trump, at a campaign rally last week in Mosinee, Wisconsin. Get used to such photo-ops from now until Election Day as Trump hits the campaign trail. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

We can talk about all sorts of variables that will go into next week’s vote: the weather, what dominates the weekend news cycle, voting irregularities and so forth.

But in the end, this election is about one thing: President Trump.

At least, that’s how the president wants it.

Trump’s final round of campaigning will include stops in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia.

There will be 11 very public rallies over six very noisy days.

Plus, countless tweets and unscripted ad hominem assaults lobbed at Democrats and the media (there’s a difference?), guaranteed to keep Trump at the center of the news tempest.

We haven’t seen a midterm election like this – not in modern times, at least.

Setting aside the midterm vote of 2002, which was overshadowed by the previous year’s terrorist attacks, consider how two of Trump’s recent predecessors approached their first midterm referenda.

Professor Clinton received a failing grade, losing 54 House seats and 8 in the Senate, with both chambers falling into Republican hands for the first time in four decades.

In 2010, Barack Obama tried to recreate the “yes, we can” magic from two years prior. Fittingly, his final stop on a four-state tour over the final weekend of the election played out in a Cleveland stadium with plenty of empty seats.

Obama would go on to lose 63 House seats and 6 in the Senate – the beginning of a dramatic Democratic erosion in the party’s congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative ranks during his White House tenure.

Trump likely won’t suffer that level of personal humiliation on Tuesday. Unlike Clinton, he doesn’t have to struggle to explain a robust economy. Unlike Obama, he’s not on the wrong end of a political market correction (House seats Democrats gained in 2008 returning to Republican form in 2010).

Moreover, unlike the first Clinton and Obama midterms, voters aren’t being asked for an up-or-down vote on a large, transformational idea (Hillarycare in 1994; Obamacare in 2010).

However, this election is personal. Because Trump wants it that way.

Thus the president has thrown himself, full force, into red states across American where, conveniently enough, incumbent Democratic senators find themselves on the ropes (thank you, Justice Kavanaugh).

What we’ll see, in this final week, if whether Trump has a skill that his predecessors lacked. And that would be the ability to transfer his mojo into his party’s down-ticket offerings.

Try as he did, Obama never could convince Hispanics and women and millennials to turn out, in similar numbers and with similar enthusiasm, as they did in his two presidential runs.

Clinton did defy presidential gravity in his second midterm in 1998, but that was more about Newt Gingrich’s over-reach than any presidential overtures.

Now it’s Trump’s turn to convince his legions that a vote for [fill in the blank] in [choose the state] is none the different from torturing Hillary Clinton and the political ruling class two years ago.

What the last week of campaigning will tell us: was Trump enough of an influencer to deliver Republican Senate and gubernatorial victories in Florida, what should be a Senate win in Missouri and Senate upsets in Montana and West Virginia, while staving off a Democratic gubernatorial win in Georgia?

The flip side of the Trump factor: we’ll also learn the depth and breadth of animosity toward the president, as expressed in how large the haul of House seats by Democrats.

Here’s a chart of midterm results dating back to FDR, including gains/losses and (where available) presidential approval ratings. You’ll notice that Trump has the most House Republican seats to defend, for a GOP president. His 40% Gallup approval rating (down 4 points from the previous week, with fresh numbers coming next Monday) places Trump astern of Clinton and Obama at the same point in their presidencies.

But don’t become wed to that number: Clinton’s Gallup number surged five points, to 48%, on the eve of his smackdown.

But Clinton was also a victim of larger political forces. The Southern charm that worked to his benefit as a centrist-styled candidate worked to the detriment of his more liberal party (Democrats would lose 16 House seats in the Old Confederacy in 1994). Forty years of nearly exclusive one-party rule on Capitol Hill made the majority Democrats seem tired and borderline-corrupt. Meanwhile, the opposition party was organized and brimming with new ideas.

That wasn’t quite the case in 2010 (America wasn’t looking at a 40-year realignment). However, the result was a severer backlash against a president who seemed too smug and dismissive of those who dared to think differently, or question his wisdom.

The same could be said about Trump – he can be smug, dismissive.

He also may be the luckiest politician on the planet. He drew Hillary as an opponent. The political media take the bait on his barbs and insults. Senate Democrats thought that besmirching Brett Kavanaugh was a winning hand.

Trump may not get what he wants in this midterm – Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress.

But if the result is a GOP Senate and a Democratic House, Trump perhaps gets what he needs -- the ability to keep churning out judges, while newly empowered Democrats overdo it on investigations and impeachment.